Encouragement from Howell Harris

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Howell Harris was an 18th-century preacher in Wales. He was a contemporary of George Whitefield and was used mightily by God to draw many to Himself during what became known as the Great Awakening.

The following is an extended quote from a letter he wrote in March of 1742. It gives insight into his understanding of justification by faith and how it aids the ongoing life of a believer. I leave it here for your encouragement:

[Jesus] is our righteousness in which we stand equally justified at all times, even in the eye of infinite justice! Though we in our obedience fall short of the glory of God, yet He accepts us being complete in Christ. It is true we perceive millions of imperfections in all that we think, say, and do. But we appear before God, not what we are in ourselves, but what we are in Christ. The moment we flee to Him we become dead to the law as to any expectation of life by keeping it. And as the law cannot save us, so neither can it condemn us to eternal death; Christ having, in our stead, answered all its demands!

But having found rest from the terrors of the law, through the life and death of Emmanuel, we have it written in our hearts, and we long for an entire conformity to its precepts, because in it we behold the image of our heavenly Father. We love holiness because God is holy, and hate sin because it is Satan's image, and contrary to the divine nature. -- O what happiness to see 'Christ all in all,' and self nothing!--to see God's eternal love in the Redeemer, and eternal life flowing to us freely from that Fountain! This will enable us to bear more fruit to our dear Lord and to be more useful in his church...

When you commit sin, and see all you think and do to be sin, then do not reason with unbelief, but look immediately to Him, that has no sin, who is become yours by grace; else you will give the enemy an advantage over you. But as soon as you flee to Him, then your peace shall be established, and your soul shall be swallowed up in deeper admiration of his free sovereign grace, who called you, and made you to differ, when there was no difference between you and those that are on the road to hell.1

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1. Edward Morgan, The Life and Times of Howell Harris: The First Itinerant Preacher in Wales (Denton: Need of the Times Publishers, 1998), 162-163.

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